Our muscles screamed with pain for the first few days, and our skills and speed at making and breaking camp were far from slick. There was more to adapt to, though, than just the physical effort and environment. The special adaptations I was using to give me support to sit in the kayak were needing some attention.
“So a bit more foam here for lumbar support, you think?” Suresh asked, pulling off threads of gummy fabric tape holding the chunks of foam and plastic together to create my postural support. The support had “wings” made from an old windsurf harness, reemployed as lateral support that fastened together with a strap across my front. “Yeah, my shoulders are slumped forward and giving me bad posture and a terrible ache between my shoulder blades. A bit more lumbar support and a couple inches off the height of the whole backrest might help.”
The previous day, my own backache had been piercing and ripped upward through my neck to the back of my head. I doubted my ability to continue with that searing pain, but I held onto a glimmer of
hope. If the pain was posture--related, it would be curable. Suresh studied how I fit in the cockpit. He hacked into a chunk of foam pipe insulation and cut a strip to fit across the lumbar area of my back support. I have no use of the muscles below my chest level, so I would wobble badly without some support provided a few inches above my waist.
I set out the next day with my modified support, and by lunchtime the relief glowed from me—the backache had disappeared. I was amazed that a couple of inches of pipe insulation could have such a profound effect on my pain.
Balance and posture were major considerations for Adi and me. I had chosen to paddle a double kayak, as I didn’t trust my ability to balance in a single kayak in the inevitable choppy seas. Adi, a semi-professional kayaker prior to his injury and now paralyzed from the waist down, had better balance than I and felt confident paddling single. Both of us had our own modifications for posture support, and one of the aims of the trip was to research the optimum design of these and other bits of equipment useful to wilderness kayaking.
The star of this array of special equipment was the “Field Toilet.” Without use of our legs, it was impossible for Adi or me to hover over the tide line and from rocks in quite the same way as everyone else in the team. The prototype of the Field Toilet—basically a bottom-shaped plastic seat with a hole in it, padded and mounted on four short legs—had to be set up each morning—below the high tide line. On one occasion, it was placed close to the water’s edge, and Adi was set there and given his privacy. Some time later, someone finally heard Adi’s expletives above the roar of breaking waves and rolling shingle. The tide had come in, and the water was swirling around Adi and the toilet.
